One of the most highly regarded and well known of all twentieth-century British artists, Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) is famous for two things. He immortalized the Berkshire village of Cookham, where he was born and spent most of his life. And he celebrated sex both on his canvases and through his unconventional understanding of relationships.

Perhaps best known for his paintings of biblical subjects set in and around Cookham--in particular, The Resurrection, Cookham--Spencer was also an official war artist during both World Wars. In his paintings and in his life, he reveled in the intense ordinariness of the world he inhabited. His mature art fuses things most often thought of as separate: religion and sex, the real and the imaginary, public and private, the young and the old, the self and others.

In this excellent introduction to the artist and his work, Kitty Hauser reveals how Spencer's art grew out of places, experiences, and social relations that enriched his imagination. Though Spencer is often described as visionary, this book shows that his brand of mysticism was firmly grounded in material reality--in landscapes, homes, and the human relationships he felt so strongly.

Stanley Spencer is seen as one of the most innovative British painters of his era. His works include pre-First World War paintings and complex pieces of the mid-1930s, produced at a time of marital and stylistic crisis. This catalogue celebrates the achievements of an artist who explored, experimented and developed his work over five decades and accompanies the exhibition of Spencer's work at Tate Britain, presenting him as a major artist of the 20th century who was profoundly engaged with the shifting nature of modern life. The book includes an essay by the painter and writer Timothy Hyman which focuses on the prolonged but strangely fruitful crisis of the 1930s, while examining both the visionary and realist strands in Spencer's imagination. Cultural historian Patrick Wright discusses Spencer's return to England after the First World War and the circles in which he moved.

Kitty Hauser is an art historian whose work has been published widely, including in the Burlington Magazine and the New Left Review. She won the Bernard Denvir Memorial Award for Art Criticism in 1999.

2001-07-03 Original, fair, beautifully written

Hauser's book is an excellent guide to the debates surrounding Spencer. It is the most fair-minded account of Spencer's preoccupations that I have come across, and certainly the most beautifully written. In conclusion, then, it blew me away.